Intentional Cultural Engineering for Social and Environmental Responsibility

About

The Intentioneer’s Bible is a history of Western civilization emphasizing the two parallel cultures, first that of gifting and sharing, and second that of taking and exchanging. These two are generally known as the counterculture or Fourth World, and the dominant culture or First World, respectively. Of these two parallel cultures, The Intentioneer’s Bible emphasizes the counterculture of gifting and sharing as an alternative to the more better known narrative of the development of civilization according to the stories usually told of competition, war, patriarchy, and money.

The stories included in The Intentioneer’s Bible focus upon the efforts made to maintain or to return to non-monetary-based culture, where people together push the monetary system out of their lives in favor of gifting and sharing. This is a surprisingly rich and varied history often touched upon in the usual histories of civilization yet rarely very clearly or to any depth. The counterculture trys to make its views, philosophies, and experiences known to people in the dominant culture, yet this is often lost in the daily dramas of wealth, fame, power, belligerence, and chauvinism.

Finding and telling the stories of the just and joyous throughout history is no short story! This author began the project about 1980, found that it was a very big project, and took about 35 years to get it done. Now it is offered to readers as a book of over eleven-hundred pages, with over half-a-million words, referencing over five-hundred separate sources, presenting the people, their ideas, and how they have lived them to create versions of paradise within a beautiful yet often difficult world.

These are stories of great passion and achievement, of the dedication to humanistic values struggling for expression within a dominant culture of cynical derision, hateful oppression, commercial co-optation, and the marginalization, disregard, and disrespect for the sincerity of those who believe that human society can be constructed upon, and who dedicate their lives to the building and enjoyment of, peace and harmony.

This presentation of our countercultural history includes many quotations from the sources found, letting the people who lived it tell some of their own stories. This results in one view of The Intentioneer’s Bible as being essentially one very long literary essay. The names of the people included as sources, and the titles of their books and other writings, are presented in order to encourage and facilitate the reader’s further inquiry into the lives and quests of those who have sought to create the culture of their choosing. Readers can use The Intentioneer’s Bible to begin or to further their own quest into understanding how it is that human civilization has reached its current state, and how they may work for their desired future in community with those of like mind.

An important emphasis of The Intentioneer’s Bible is the focus upon terminology and how people talk and write about alternative or parallel cultures. The language or words used to present and explain the counterculture necessarily change with the times, and several terms unfamiliar to most readers are included in the book, beginning with “Intentioneer.” While a future book will present much more discussion of this and other terms, like “partnership culture,” they are included in this work with limited elaboration in order to focus at present upon history and future projections. This focus is divided in The Intentioneer’s Bible among the following eight sections called “books”:
1. The Book of Ideals
2. Egalitarianism in the Ancient World
3. Egalitarianism in the Early Christian Era
4. Egalitarianism in Secular and Tribal Culture
5. Communitarianism in the 19th Century
6. Communitarianism in the 20th Century
7. Intentioneering the 21st Century
8. The Book of Intuitions

Upon writing or reading such a history, The Intentioneer’s Bible inspires thoughts about how the counterculture of gifting and sharing may develop through the future. While there are many projections of a coming apocalypse, which may already be upon us, people need to also learn about positive alternative future scenarios in order to have hope for the future, and to be able to recognize the paths through the future that can and will, if we make the effort, lead us to ever greater approximations of paradise on Earth. For these and other reasons, about the last tenth of The Intentioneer’s Bible presents projections of both negative and positive futures, making this book a work of both fiction and non-fiction.

Welcome to the Fourth World, where the love of gifting and sharing is the root of all happiness! —The Intentioneer’s Bible